Tag: progress

This Too…

Outside the window of my writing desk, across the field in the distance, sits a standing grove of trees. Not long ago it was beautifully surrounded by a sloping grassy hill rolling down into a field that stretched out bearing alternate crops of corn and soybeans. Now the grove sits alone, the field practically leveled. Exposed compacted red clay lays ready for more concrete and asphalt of the impending neighborhood being constructed. For years I’ve enjoyed looking out across that field. Even hiking up to the sacred feeling space sometimes. Sometimes the dog was with me. Sometimes it was just me. But curiously, it never felt like just me.

Once everything was cleared, the grove of trees was left standing. I wondered why. Uncle Joe, the family’s approaching centenarian and patriarch of this land said there was a graveyard up there. At least it was when he was a boy. I found it interesting because as many times as I’d been up on that hill, I never saw a graveyard. He said it was there but had never seen any burials there in his life time. We are talking about nearly an entire century here. Spurred on by my curiosity, I set out to explore the grove again minus the beautiful rising slope of thick grass on which we had fantasized of building our house. The area was cordoned off with an orange netted fence that both the dog and I easily hopped over. Finally on the northwest side, in the thick of the grove, I saw the first tombstone. It stretched out prone among the trees, lying there like a sleeping behemoth. There there were others. Some in pristine condition, others cracked and being swallowed up by earth but present as a reminder of lives once lived.

I could make out a name or two. Wondered who they were. Where had they lived? What did they do? Had they left some mark that impacted the now? Who were their descendants? All I could physically see were stones. The cold hard monuments stood in contrast to the warmth of lives once lived. What had been their concerns, their worries, their fears, or challenges. None of that mattered to them now. As I stood there, mortality tapped upon my intellect and took me forward a hundred years or so and there it was; someone looking upon the markers of those of us present now and asking some of those same questions.

Suddenly I had a shift in perspective. This too shall pass has become a common bumper sticker proverb. However, its profundity is no less relevant. What are we doing with the time we’ve been granted her on this plain? Are we using precious energy and limited time on things that won’t matter in the long run..or short? How much time do we waste on worry and fretting; time that could be invested in living while we yet live? All of those material things that we slave for and give life to will belong to someone else in a hundred years or so. We will be just a memory. Where are you planting those seeds that will continue to birth the power of your living beyond your lifetime? What legacy are you building by living in all the corners of this thing call life?

One day soon. That grove of trees will be surrounded by the voices of children playing, crying laughing, heading to and from school. It will be surrounded by people making love, more children, marrying, divorcing, working, and buying. Some could even call it living the American dream and then… that too shall pass. All we have is the now. It belongs to us in the present. Let us go all out and do what we can and will with want we have with the most precious gift of all because one day, we’ll have to give it all back.

Constructing A Sentence

This past weekend, in Montgomery, AL I stood in the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice surrounded by the weight of history—our history. I saw the names, the chains, the terror written into law, the bodies strung from trees like strange fruit, the incarceration statistics. I felt the gravity of centuries of pain, and yet, what shook me just as deeply was not only what was behind us—but what is still wrapped tight around us.

Complicity – the quiet acceptance of injustice. Ignorance is not the act of not knowing, but the passive choice of ignoring. The refusal to confront truth. Consider the audacity of a system that still forces Black and Brown children to learn and thrive under the names of those who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved, and their descendants who don’t realize they lost (or did they?). I speak from a space of knowing, having once taught at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama. I walked those halls, labored in the classrooms, and looked into the eyes of those students—brilliant, gifted, filled with promise—and I asked myself the same question I ask today: How can they truly learn and be whole under the banner of their oppressor? Would the Jewish people require their children to attend a school named after Adolf Hitler? Would Germany even allow a school to be named after him? Would America ask Japanese American students to pledge allegiance in a school named after the architects of their internment? I would think not. Because we recognize that names carry weight. Names shape perception. Names have power.

Yet across Alabama, across the South, we still expect our children to sit in classrooms, to dream, to rise—while the very walls around them whisper, Know your place.This isn’t history. This is now. Schools named after Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and others weren’t built in the 1800s. No, they were erected in the heart of the 20th century, long after the Civil War, as a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement. These names were chosen with intention. They were planted like landmines, meant to remind us that while laws may change, power does not surrender easily. J.E.B. Stuart high school in Virginia has been renamed Justice High School. Lee High School, in what its said to be the most progressive city in Alabama, has survived every move to get the name changed. Perchance the mindset of those who put it in place is alive and well. The wish to hold the name and what it stands for seems more desirable than the true intent to move beyond. With that, I quote the words of Dr. Martin King, Jr. in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Some will always say, “It’s just a name.” But the truth is, names have always been tools of control. That’s why enslaved people had their names erased. That’s why schools, streets, and institutions were named to honor those who upheld white mental impoverishment (I do not use the term white supremacy on purpose as there is nothing supreme about it) . That’s why the fight to reclaim names, to rename spaces, is a battle for dignity and a strong nod toward justice. It is not enough to say we have moved past the inglorious past when it still creeps among us, etched in bronze, carved into stone, stitched onto letterman jackets, and typed on diplomas. A better nation is not one that simply acknowledges wrongs—it is one that corrects them. It’s past time for change. Rename the schools. Reposition the monuments to treason. Confront the truth, not for comfort, but for justice. Anything we are seeing in today’s climate – and we are seeing it, is a direct result of seeds planted…and nourished. If we are to truly move forward exemplifying an honorable legacy, we must cease laboring under the weight of those who chained us to the past.